Wage & Hour Lawyers

Hey everybody, Attorney Scott Perlmuter, Cleveland’s Wage and hour lawyer here to talk to you today about a question that I get asked frequently by service employees, specifically police and firefighters, about whether or not they are entitled to overtime pay. So, first of all, if you’re a police or firefighter and you’re not a supervisor, you’re probably entitled to some form of overtime pay, but there are two ways in which overtime pay for those two types of employees can be different from people in private sector. First, people in the private sector they work over 40 hours a week and they’re not exempt from the wage and hour laws they get time and a half for hours words over 40 in a week. So, you get time and a half your regular rate of pay. Police or firefighters or other service employees, your employer can give you a comp times like paid time off instead of the actual pay of time and a half, so that’s difference number one. Difference number two, private sector employees are, this is a work week by work week law so, basically it’s usually Saturday to Sunday for most kinds of employees or whatever your employer sets, you get one work week, you work over 40 hours in a week you get, overtime pay. When you’re a government employee, let’s say working for the police or fire department, then it’s not necessarily a work week by work week law, they can set periods, whether it’s 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, and that’s the period that you look at to see whether or not you get that overtime pay or comp-pay. So, comments, questions, place them in the area below or feel free to give me call. For truth. For justice. For you.

Hey, everybody! Scott Perlmuter here today with Tittle & Perlmuter to talk to you about wage and hour issues regarding minimum wage and overtime pay. It comes up in a lot of our cases, and that is- employers changing clock in and clock out times of their employees. So, a lot of people call us up and ask, “Is my employer allowed to change the times when I punch in and punch out on a timeclock?” Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. So, let’s say for instance that you’re supposed to clock out manually at the end of the day and you forget to do so, so it looks like you’re working overnight until you come in the next day. In that situation, or situations that are similar to that, your employer is allowed to change your timeclock records. And same situation would apply if there was sometime during the day that you went on a break that’s longer than 30 minutes and your employer knows that you’re not working, they can change your time records, potentially, under those circumstances. That being said, in just about 100 percent of the cases that we evaluate where employers HAVE changed time records, they did not follow the law in doing so and they did so under circumstances that were illegal. So, if you have questions about your time records and your employers adjustment of your time records, the best thing that you can do is give me a call, 216-208-1522, we’ll talk through your issue and I can let you know whether or not what your employer is doing in your situation complies with the law. Also, if you want information about wage and hour laws generally, and issues about time clock changing, you can visit one of our websites, we have two websites that have information about these issues. One is overtimelawyersohio.com, the other one is our main website, which is tittlelawfirm.com. Thank you very much!

Hey, everybody! Attorney Scott Perlmuter here to talk to you today about your retirement benefits and whether or not you’re being shorted retirement benefits that you’re owed in violation of the law. So, in 2018, as most of us know, the stock market hit record highs, it was almost 27,000 in the month of October, and yet, a lot of us saw our retirement accounts not keep up with the stock market, maybe you were even losing money as the stock market was reaching these highs. At Tittle & Perlmuter, we handle all kinds of employee benefits cases, including those that are in regards to retirement pension plans, and your employer, as the sponsor for your retirement plan, has an obligation to make sure the fees that they’re paying for whoever’s managing your funds don’t exceed a reasonable fee. They also have a duty to make sure that the investment options that you’re provided are reasonable investment options and adequate for your needs as an employee. So, if you have questions about why my retirement account has not been keeping up with the market or why am I losing money in my retirement account, the best thing that you can do is give me a call, 216-242-1361 and we can talk through it. Or, you can visit our website, tittlelawfirm.com that has tons of relevant and helpful information about the laws that govern employee benefit plans and what you should be looking out for. Thank you very much!

Hey everybody, Attorney Scott Perlmuter, Cleveland’s Wage and hour lawyer here to talk to you today about a question that I get asked frequently by service employees, specifically police and firefighters, about whether or not they are entitled to overtime pay. So, first of all, if you’re a police or firefighter and you’re not a supervisor, you’re probably entitled to some form of overtime pay, but there are two ways in which overtime pay for those two types of employees can be different from people in private sector. First, people in the private sector they work over 40 hours a week and they’re not exempt from the wage and hour laws they get time and a half for hours words over 40 in a week. So, you get time and a half your regular rate of pay. Police or firefighters or other service employees, your employer can give you a comp times like paid time off instead of the actual pay of time and a half, so that’s difference number one. Difference number two, private sector employees are, this is a work week by work week law so, basically it’s usually Saturday to Sunday for most kinds of employees or whatever your employer sets, you get one work week, you work over 40 hours in a week you get, overtime pay. When you’re a government employee, let’s say working for the police or fire department, then it’s not necessarily a work week by work week law, they can set periods, whether it’s 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, and that’s the period that you look at to see whether or not you get that overtime pay or comp-pay. So, comments, questions, place them in the area below or feel free to give me call. For truth. For justice. For you.

Hey, everybody. Cleveland’s fair pay lawyer Scott Perlmuter here to talk to you today about a question that’s on the minds of a lot of my clients and a lot of people that call in here and that is can my boss just cut my rate of pay or do they have to give me notice before they cut my rate of pay? Unfortunately, the answer for most employees out there is that there’s not really a law that protects you getting a certain rate of pay – that is unless you have a contract with your employer. That says, you’re gonna be paid a certain rate, but an offer letter usually is not even gonna be enough to cover you on that end, so a lot of times employers really can cut your rate of pay even without notifying you first, the one caveat I would give you and that you should look into this happens to you, is that an employer is not allowed to retroactively change the rate of pay. So let’s say an employer says that they’re gonna pay you 15 bucks an hour to a certain job, and then you complete that job. They can’t thereafter than say, we’re only gonna pay you 12 bucks an hour for the work that you’ve already performed. So, if you got any questions, concerns, comments, drop in the area below. For truth. For justice. For you.

Hey everybody, Scott Perlmuter here, responding to one of the questions we get most often about wage and hour issues. Can my boss make me work off the clock? Not surprisingly, the answer to this question in almost every case is no. You should not be working off the clock. Now, one of two contexts this comes up that people get a little confused about. One, if you aren’t clocking in and clocking out on the job. Some employers don’t make their employees clock in and out at the job, but if you’re an hourly employee (and even in some cases for salaried employees), you should be clocking in and out. Your employer should be having you do that. They’re required to do it by law. They’re required to keep track of those hours to maintain them. The other context that it comes up is salaried employees. Salaried employees may still have to, their hours may still have to be kept by their employers. So, if you’re one of those two categories, that may be something that’s a little bit confusing to you, but you should never be working off the clock. If you are, you should be calling a lawyer. If you ever have any questions about some situation at your job, being required to work off the clock or otherwise, call us at 216-242-1361. Or go to our website, tittlelawfirm.com.

Hey everybody! Scott Perlmuter here, Wage & Hour lawyer from Tittle & Perlmuter, here to talk to you today about minimum wage and overtime laws and how they apply to commissioned employees. When I say commissioned employees, I’m really talking about sales employees who are compensated either entirely or partially by commissions. I am not talking about tipped employees, like waiters and waitresses. That’s for another video, so you get to see my smiling face again for that.

So, generally speaking, commissioned employees are entitled to minimum wage for all hours that they work during each pay period. So that means for each hour that you worked during a two-week pay period or whatever your particular pay period is, you’re entitled to that number of hours that you worked during that pay period times your state’s minimum wage. Which in Ohio, we’ve got our minimum wage up to $8.30. There are some exceptions to that rule, but they are too rare and too complex to discuss in a short video here. So, if you have questions about that just give me a call.

As for overtime pay, that really depends on your industry and how you’re paid. Some commissioned employees like car salesmen pretty much across the board do not get overtime pay – do not get one-and-a-half times the regular rate of pay. For most commissioned employees, it depends on how much you’re paid and how you’re paid. So for many commissioned employees, for them not to receive overtime, over 50% of their pay has to come from commissions as opposed to hourly or salary pay. And, each pay period your commission plus hourly and salary has to equal at least one-and-a-half times your state’s minimum wage. Again, in Ohio our minimum wage is $8.30. So each pay period your pay would have to be at least $12.45 times the number of hours you’ve worked. So if you have any questions about any kind of pay issues and you’re a commissioned sales employee, give me a call and we’ll work through it.

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It’s been determined that you need to go on long term disability. This is obviously a stressful time in your life and you probably have a lot of life changes going on. There is one piece of information that you have to observe in order to make sure that you are protecting your rights. Before you go on long term disability, before your last day of work, you need to send written correspondence to your point of contact about your long term disability benefits. Whether that’s a third party administrator, or the Human Resources person at your company, you need to send an email, a fax, you can hand deliver a letter to them, saying that you want to know how to continue or maintain all of your other employee benefit coverages during your long term disability. So if you have long term disability through your employer you probably have other employee benefits that you’re enrolled in so those might be health insurance, might be life insurance, might be accidental death and dismemberment insurance coverage, those are all employee benefits you may or may not be able to continue those while you’re on long term disability and thereafter and your employer or your plan administrator has an obligation to tell you how to do that, but the only thing that triggers that obligation to tell you that information is that you make the ask, you have to ask them how to keep or maintain those coverages, while you are on long term disability. So a lot of times if you don’t do so app or immediately after the time that you’re leaving the company you can lose those benefits forever. Sometimes there are time periods as short as 30 days after you no longer are actively working with the company when you’re on long term disability that you can lose those coverages. So it’s extremely important that before the time that you are going on long term disability you send that written correspondence email or fax in my mind is preferred because you could see that they received it, and that written correspondence says can you let me know how I keep or maintain all of my employee benefit coverages.

Hey everybody, Scott Perlmutter here to talk to you today about an overtime and minimum wage issue that we see a lot in our practice at all times and that is on call hours and whether or not your employer has to compensate you for those on call hours in the same way that they would compensate you for non call hours, and when I say on call I mean you are usually not at your place of employment but you’re at home and you have to leave your phone number and they would call you if there’s something that comes up at the office and you may have to go back into the office to do work at that time. So whether or not you have to be paid in the normal course for those on call hours, paid at least minimum wage for the hours, and then if you go over 40 in a week paid time and a half for those overtime hours, that’s a pretty fact specific determination. So it really hinges on the issue of whether you can use those hours to engage in the normal personal activities that you would engage in if you were not on call, so as you can imagine that differs from case to case, differs from person to person, so if you have a situation where your employer requires you to be on call, the best thing you can do is send an inquiry through our website or give me a call and we can talk through your  particular employment situation to figure out if your employer should be paying you in the normal course for hours you spend on call. So you got any questions about that feel free to give me a call, Scott Perlmutter (216) 242-1361 or visit our website we got a website that’s just dedicated to wage and our issues that’s https://overtimelawyersohio.com/ or visit our main website which is – https://tittlelawfirm.com/. Thank you very much.

Hey everybody, Scott Perlmutter here to talk to you today about the intersection between salary payments and overtime pay requirements. So we’ve shot some videos here of posted in the past about whether all salaried employees are exempt from overtime and while that’s a common misconception, that if you receive salary then you don’t get overtime it’s not true. Many employees who get salary still when they work over 40 hours a week are required to be paid time and a half for their hours where it’s over 40. So I’m here to talk about a specific issue today that we get questions pretty frequently about, which is didn’t something happen back in 2016 to change the salary basis requirements, and temporarily it was supposed, to yes. Back in 2016 under President Obama, the Department of Labor implemented, or tried to implement a new rule to double the amount of salary, before someone can be exempted from overtime. So prior to 2016 if you were paid at least four hundred fifty five dollars per week which equates to $23,000 per year and you met one of certain types of job duties, administrative, executive, professional, or computer employees you were not required to be paid over time, time and a half hours worked over 40 in a work week. In 2016 the Department of Labor tried to change that rule to double up that number, make it $913 per week and or $47,746 per year in order to exempt someone as 2016 the as a salary exempt employee, so in other words if you made less than that even if you were paid a salary, you would still have to be paid time and a half for your hours worked over 40. No sooner thank the ink dried on the Department of Labor making that rule though, a federal court in Texas stopped it from being implemented saying that that had exceeded the power of the Department of Labor that they weren’t allowed to raise the salary basis that much and then when President Trump was elected the Department of Labor’s stopped trying to change that rule in the same fashion. So as it sits here today we’re back to the pre-2016 rule which is $455 dollars per week or $23,000 per year if you make less than that even if you’re paid a salary the same amount every week you are still entitled to time and a half for hours worked over 40, and if you’re paid a salary but it’s over $23,000 thousand dollars per year or $455 per week but you don’t meet one of those administrative executive professional or computer employees that require a lot of explanation, you should call me if you have a question about one whether or not you meet one of those if you’re if you make more than that but you’re not one of those employees you are still entitled to time and a half four hours works over 40 in a workweek. So if you have more questions about that you can do a few things, you can come to one of our websites which both have information about the salary basis exemption. That’s https://tittlelawfirm.com/ or overtimelawyersOhio.com, which we have a website devoted entirely to this kind of wage and hour information, or you can give us a call two one (216)308)1522, I’m always here to answer whatever questions you got. Thank you.

Hey everybody Scott Perlmutter here today to give you your daily dose of overtime law knowledge. This is an issue that may be depriving you of overtime pay that you’re entitled to, it’s something that both employers and employees have a lack of knowledge about that we find in so many of our cases. That is determining the proper rate of pay for your overtime rate, so you let’s say you get paid 10 bucks an hour you probably think from time over 40 hours in a week I get time and a half that means $15 an hour. Some cases you may be right, some cases, many cases you may be wrong, because if you’re paid an hourly rate but you get extra pay for certain things at work, so let’s say you get a travel bonus let’s say you get a driving bonus, let’s say you get a shift differential and say you get sales, bonuses, commission’s, those are all additional pay that have to be added back into your base rate, before your overtime rate is calculated. So where as me make 10 bucks an hour for your regular hourly rate, those additional amounts have to be added back in that would cause your $15 an hour pay for hours over 40 to be increased based on those numbers, the calculations can be really complex and so should basically if you’ve got a question about this give me a call we’ll go through your pay we’ll go through your hours worked and we’ll figure out what is the proper hourly rate and have you been shorted overtime that you worked. So you got questions, one thing you can do is visit our website which has a ton of good information on this we have a website devoted just to overtime and minimum wage laws and that is overtimelawyersOhio.com you can visit our main website tittlelawfirm.com that’s got also some helpful information about wage and hour laws, or you can give me a call (216)242-1361 Scott Perlmutter, I’m happy to talk to you any time about your minimum wage and overtime questions. Thanks.

Hey everybody, Attorney Scott Perlmuter here today to talk to you about salary deductions. What is my employer doing? It it proper, improper, how they’re going about this? So, you may receive a salary at your job, meaning you get paid the same amount, whether you work 40 or 80 hours in a week. In some circumstances, that may be okay. However, if your employer is taking deductions out of your salary, there are very limited circumstances where they’re allowed to do that and not pay you overtime for hours worked over 40 a week. So, for instance, the only categories, really, of deductions that they can take properly from your salary would be personal days, they’re not for sickness or disability, if you have been compensated for jury duty or for military leave, or if you have a disciplinary suspension for violating a company safety rule or something of that sort. So, if you are paid a salary but you get deducted from your pay for other reasons, let’s say that there’s just not enough work to do or something along those lines, then your employer may be violating wage and hour rules, meaning that you may be entitled to overtime for time worked over 40 hours in a week. If your employer is deducting any pay from your salary and you have any questions, the best thing you can do is visit one of our websites, Overtime Lawyers Ohio has a bunch of information dedicated just to wage and hour issues, and also, on our main website, tittlelawfirm.com, we’ve got plenty of information there as well about various wage and hour issues. Or, you can give me a call at (216)-242-1361, I’m happy to talk to you anytime. Thank you very much!

Hey, everybody! Scott Perlmuter here again today to drop some knowledge bombs on you about wage and hour issues. And the specific issue that I’m here to talk about today is: Common industries where we see violations of wage and hour laws run rampant. So, understand that under federal and state wage and hour laws, there are certain jobs and certain industries that the employers may be exempt, if they follow the rules, from paying their employees overtime. However, those are the industries where employees will cut corners, they’ll fudge the issues, they don’t know the nuances of the law, and therefore, they’ll call one of their employees or sets of employees exempt from overtime when they’re really not exempt from overtime. So, what industries are we seeing violations most commonly in? IT Industry, computer workers, network technicians, service technicians of any sort, cable workers for instance, big violators in that industry. Sales representatives, healthcare workers, home health nurses, tipped employees in the restaurant industry, big violators of wage and hour laws. Oil and gas field workers, bankers and mortgage brokers, big violations in that industry, specifically when it comes to commissions and bonuses, retail employees, big violations in that industry as well. So, if you work in one of these industries or you work in ANY industry and you’ve got questions about the way that you’re being paid and whether the pay practices at your employer are in accordance with the wage and hour laws, give me a call, 216-242-1361, I’ll be happy to talk through your issue, or visit our website, tittlelawfirm.com, or we have a website that’s devoted just to wage and hour issues and that is overtimelawyersohio.com. Scott Perlmuter, thanks for listening!